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Certification Roadmap

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I came across a cool diagram a while back - attached is the the CompTIA Certification Roadmap.

I know it is a bit dated as it was released in 2007, but I have been using this as a guide for a while now in helping students select the right learning path to achieve their end goal. It may be useful when choosing your certifications.

Attached Files:

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Also remember that for work based assessment there's SFIA (Skills Framework for the Information Age) - http://www.sfia.org.uk/cgi-bin/wms.pl/296 - which is not certification based but looks at responsibilities of specific jobs. Employers can use this to set job descriptions/responsibilities and people (BCS Members get this for free) can also check their work to see what level of "skill" they have reached.

Not a bad overview, but a slightly idealised view of the various certification tracks.

Theres a lot missing even as of 2007 and the certs don't really fit together as nicely as that diagram depicts.

The Advanced / Specialist / Expert categories don't make much sense on most of the tracks, so you can't be an expert developer without MCA ? No such thing as an expert Linux admin then ?

Security specialists don't need CISSP, CEH, CREST, etc then ?

Theres no easy track for developers to get MCA, especially Java developers. If it was a real tube map you'd have to get off the train and start digging the tunnel !

As always I'd advise people to do their own research before embarking on any certification.

Click to expand...

I agree with most of your comments - this diagram is a very idealised view, but it does help to identify the main certifications and where/how they fit. I have worked closely with CompTIA in the past and would be very happy to extend contact with a close contact to get a revised version completed - they are always happy to do things like that.

If you have any suggestions about how the reformatted roadmap should look, then please let me know.

Like I said I'm not sure if its really a good idea or not to try and condense the whole certification ecosystem/taxonomy onto one diagram.

The different vendors are continually changing their own views of their cert programs, Microsoft have changed thier MCA to be a more soft skills / business facing view of an Architect. It therefore does not really sit 'above' developer certs or CCIE etc but off to the side on an architect / consultancy track ?

There are many specialist roles and qualifications about, the diagram has seemingly deliberately left off many certs, for example it has only two Sun certs even though there were at least 12 Sun certs as of 2007, the same probably applies with Oracle too.

If there is a desire to keep the diagram to the most 'common' or mainstream IT roles then it might be best to avoid specialist and expert certs all together and focus on entry level and intermediate mainstream certs.

However this would then boil down largely to the sort of advice available all over this site. A+, N+, MCDST, MCSA etc.

I think others have covered these topics before, there was a blog referenced on this site where a experienced network manager suggested creating standard training programs for IT, part of these programs could be certifications. My problem with this is that while colleges aren't perfect at creating industry relevant programs, the certification programs aren't perfect either, couple this together with the fact the certification industry now suffers from some very dubious practices going on, the whole idea would probably be dead on arrival.

The whole idea also kind of assumes that certifications on their own form a balanced education, which again I do not think is true in most cases.

Say I want to learn about how to design Operating Systems, or assembler, C, C++, paralell programming, kernel debugging, distributed systems, scenegraphs, rendering engines, modelling, computer architecture (in general not just x86-64), software architecture, design, algorithms, compilers, etc and a whole host of other subjects. Certifications will not in general teach me these subjects. Also most certifications are not vendor neutral, so there is a lot of bias which in my mind does not really have a place in education.

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